james test

April 25-27, 2016 I've had a jar of molasses in the cupboard for a while, and I've spent that time trawling for suitable recipes and excuses to bake with it. It's taken a few months to get it into this gingerbread layer cake, baked to share with our cat-sitter and friend, Tash. The recipe comes from Smitten Kitchen - I know that Deb Perelman is a bit of a perfectionist with her recipes, and I like that she takes understated, realistic food photos in her own small home kitchen. (They're still a good deal prettier than mine, I know.) I trust her to bake a good cake. In fact, I think I just entrusted her with baking my first layer cake. The batter was pretty well-behaved; with oil and not butter for the fat, it didn't even need creaming with an electric beater. It just called for a bit of patience as I baked and cooled the three layers, one at a time, late on a Monday night. I whipped up the mascarpone cream on Wednesday morning and stacked up my cake with care, ignor...

April 16-22, 2016 I'm spending a couple of months in Stockholm for work - a good excuse to add another country to our restaurant review map . Most of my meals out so far have been lunches, with work colleagues picking out some highlights around the centre of town and me doing a bit of weekend exploring further afield. The food scene seems very veg-friendly - everywhere I've gone has had prominent vego/vegan options, and there are a decent number of totally vegetarian places. I had my first meal of the trip at Hermitage (Stora Nygatan 11, Gamla Stan), a vego restaurant that Cindy and I visited way back in 2006 . Its buffet-style lunch of old-fashioned vego food powered me up for a big day of walking, with a mock-meat and chickpea stew, a big chunk of vegetarian lasagne, potato salad, bread, rice and some hummus. For 120kr (~$20) with a coffee, this is pretty decent value for money as far as Stockholm lunches go. I went back for seconds to make sure I really got my money's w...

April 10 & 12, 2016 We're regular Smith & Daughters visitors and, as you can see up top, this is our seventh blog post about the restaurant. Yet our last post is from more than a year ago! Here's a run-down of the current, very-limited-time-only 2nd birthday menu. The weekend brunch menu takes its inspiration from American diner food, and with the help of Nat & Ben we were well across it. Michael was drawn in by the Brekkie Hot Dog ($15), piled up with tofu scramble, cheese, onion, bacon and BBQ sauce. It's an excellent vegan hot dog, to be sure, but one that taught me I'm not up to weiners and BBQ sauce this early in the day. Nat was most enamoured with the mac n cheese ($14), carby and creamy and garnished with just a sprinkle of paprika. My surprise highlight was the hash ($16). The jalapenos and avocado of their long-standing Mexican hash are replaced here with bacon, onion and kale; the same corn, cheese sauce and starchy foundation of fried potatoes s...

April 10, 2016 We were overdue for a home-cooked meal in general, a healthy one in particular and, I thought, another go at the Community cookbook. Once I saw the recipe for roasted pear (in season!) and gorgonzola (delicious year-round!) salad I didn't look any further. A look in the cupboard and the shops took me a little off recipe. I added a whole head of cauliflower to the recipe for some extra golden-edged substance. Most of the pears in our neighbourhood were rock-hard and not ready for dinner, but Michael found a few nashi pears at Pachamama that were worth a shot. The white wine (not white balsamic) vinegar and black lentils in the pantry would surely do the job. Sage leaves were plentiful but didn't fry to a crisp as they were supposed to. The ingredient proportions didn't quite add up (too, too many lentils and not quite enough dressing) but it was easy to portion out our own plates and make plans for the leftovers later. The salad was everything I had anticipa...

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on March 29, 2016 Fo Guang Yuan Art Gallery is one of the two biggest oversights highlighted in our Cheap Eats project spreadsheet - it's a vegetarian eatery that's been open the entire decade we've lived in Melbourne, yet we've never visited and blogged it until now. I put this down to the dining hall's opening hours, which are restricted to weekday lunch times and therefore quite inaccessible to us non-city workers. My workplace issued me with an Easter Tuesday off this year, and I used it to sneak in and give the gallery tea house a go at long last. It was quiet, almost hushed, and I had no trouble getting a four-seated table to myself. The menu is much longer than I'd expect for such an unassuming operation. The appetisers alone run to twenty mostly deep-fried options, and then there are several dozen more stir-fries, tossed noodles, noodles and noddle soups. Most dishes involve mock meat, with a few centred around tofu or mushroom...

March 27-28, 2016 I was up for a cooking project on the Easter weekend, and the Serious Eats website was a good place to find one. Their columnist J. Kenji López-Alt is quite the experimentalist, and concentrates on vegan recipes for a month each year. He's inspired us to make icecream , soup and deep-fried cauliflower (and similarly driven our friend Stu to make and share a spectacular layered queso dip ). All this is just a wind-up and justification for the title of this post: I tried putting tofu and rice in my waffle iron because Serious Eats said it was cool . Both the article's comments and common sense told me that this could get messy, and it did. My waffle iron has a handle for making a 180° flip during cooking, and that was all my tofu needed to spill marinade everywhere. It's also got deep grooves, which are great for crispy high-surface-area waffles and getting batter stuck when the iron's not sufficiently greased... I should have paid more attention to ...

March 20, 2016 I've clearly been dominating the dessert division at our Ottolenghi get-togethers, because I felt a teensy bit flummoxed at the prospect of making a main. I lounged around with Plenty and Plenty More and some little ripped bookmarks, looking out for picnic-friendly autumn-appropriate dishes. I had plenty of time to plan and shop and cook. Michael nudged me into making the Very Full Tart - it looked like a ripper centrepiece and unlikely to be any the worse for being served at air temperature. Ottolenghi recipes are notoriously effortful, and this is the rare one where you can actually bring extra work upon yourself. In Plenty , the recipe simply demands that you procure 300g of shortcrust pastry. Welp, I made my own. With a food processor on hand it's not too much of a drag, and I called on this ol' pumpkin tart recipe for (butter-heavy) quantities. From there it was a long, slow procession of chopping and roasting vegetables - capsicums in two colours, egg...